Pradeep Kumar [BLOG]

Traveling not just makes you a better person but also makes you a smarter person. I’m not a great traveler, but I used to roam a lot for several reasons. I became more adaptable as I traveled. It made me occupied and curious. The more you travel the more you’ll learn about others and most importantly about yourself.

The aim is to come out of your comfort zone and live a different life. You’ll be independent and you’ll make your own choices – choices like food, transportation mode, sightseeing, etc., – you’ll be able to take such random decisions and you’ll feel confident about the results. Moreover, you might be travelling alone and that’s a big plus. You’ll get the chance to have random peaceful thoughts and that increases your creativity.

You can use any app or better you can have a notebook (or diary) and note down all your daily activities. You can make them better day by day. When you complete your journey you’ll be happy to see the positive improvements and that makes you more confident than ever. You’ll also get chances to meet strangers while travelling, and I would suggest you to “Ask Questions”. You should often do this, especially if you are an introvert. Asking questions increases your ability to create a better conversation/communication (wait, no arguments) and thus, you can also make new good friends.

By travelling, you’ll be obviously visiting a place far away from yours, so it’s basically a new environment and chances are that you won’t be really familiar with their culture and happenings. That gives you a chance to test your adaptability skills.

You’ll try to adapt yourself to different languages, locations, foods, costumes, climate/weather, blah blah., see little things like these can do a great impact in your life. You’ll find it very difficult to catch buses/flights in time or you might wait for hours to catch a bus or train and if you are travelling alone with your own transportation then you’ll find several wrong routes, someone might give you wrong directions, you’ll end up changing your regular path due to rain, etc., things like this will test your adaptability (or patience) skills and they are worth it.

You should miss your home now and then, that is your absolute comfort zone and you should come out of that often to see the reality outside. You’ll be either staying in a hotel or your friend’s place far away from your home, that changes the way you live your life. You won’t feel 100% comfortable with the way things work there, so you’ll try your best to ‘adjust’ and live.

Meanwhile, you’ll also learn the importance of your family and friends, you’ll realise how your life will be without their support and without their protection. You can see the pros and cons of such a life and make yourself clear with the difference. You’ll miss your family, pets, friends, girlfriends, lovers, regular Tea shop, favourite Biryani, etc., all such things. You’ll come across various memories, especially when you are alone. Finally, you might realise that simple things matter the most.

I’m not talking about adventures like Hobbit or Hangover movie, but a decent one with enough mischiefs. You might have spent about 1000$ or plus for a trip, but you should understand what you are about to experience is more valuable than the money you spent. So make that worthy.

Plan at the last moment, enjoy each and every beautiful location. Take pictures (or selfies). Eat the most popular dish there. Never ever booze and drive/ride. Be adventurous and get some decent bad experiences. Make sure each and every moment turns out to be a wonderful memory, something you can cherish forever.

This is the best thing you’ll learn – you’ll become a minimalistic guy. You’ll take/use the things you actually need and you’ll forget about the rest. I prefer taking a single backpack when I travel, you have to be economic while travelling. Just keep the most important stuff like maybe your camera, charger, food, water, clothes, etc., and travel with a single backpack.

Also, you should be avoiding Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, blah blah, for a while when you are travelling. Because they are very time-consuming and deviating. Enjoy your trip, make it awesome and then brag about it on Facebook.

So once again, traveling makes you a better person and also a different person. Not everything works according to your plan so you may also come across several disappointments, but that’s not the end of the world, so just move on and act accordingly. The goal is to end our journey way better off than when we started it. Let’s expect the unexpected. 😉

“Jagriti Yatra is an initiative of Jagriti Sewa Sansthan, a non-governmental organization that promotes entrepreneurship. Jagriti Yatra is an ambitious train journey of discovery and transformation that takes hundreds of India’s highly motivated youth, especially those who are from small towns and villages of India, on a 15 day, 8000 km national odyssey to meet the role models – social and business entrepreneurs – of the country. The vision of Jagriti is ‘building India through enterprise’.” (via their website)

Looking forward to meeting all those awesome folks on December 24th! ^_^